Antonijevic-Elliott Stanislava, Lyons Rena, O' Malley Mary Pat, Meir Natalia, Haman Ewa, Banasik Natalia, Carroll Clare, McMenamin Ruth, Rodden Margaret, Fitzmaurice Yvonne
Discipline of Speech and Language Therapy, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland.
Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel.
Clin Linguist Phon. 2020;34(4):293-311. doi: 10.1080/02699206.2019.1637458. Epub 2019 Jul 10.
The number of children speaking more than one language as well as the number of languages spoken in Ireland has increased significantly posing a problem for timely identification of children with language disorder. The current study aims to profile performance of monolingual and multilingual children on language processing tasks: non-word repetition (NWR) and sentence repetition (SR). We used: (1) Crosslinguistic (CL) and English Language-Specific (LS) NWR and (2) SR in English, Polish and Russian. Children's socioeconomic status, language emergence, the age of exposure (AoE) to English and the percentage of English spoken at home were recorded. The study included 88 children age 5-8 attending a school in a disadvantaged area.CL and LS NWR yielded similar distribution of scores for monolinguals and multilinguals. The tasks identified small number of children who performed significantly lower than the mean while there were no significant differences between the groups. In English SR, monolinguals significantly outperformed multilinguals. Comparison of SR in English and Polish/Russian indicated that some children showed balanced performance in both of their languages while others showed marked differences performing better in either Polish/Russian or English depending on their AoE to English and percentage of English spoken at home.The pilot study suggests that CL-NWR is a promising screening tool for identifying monolingual and multilingual children with language disorder while SR provides more detailed information on children's language performance relative to their language exposure. SR task is recommended to be used only if comparable tasks are available in all of children's languages.
在爱尔兰，说多种语言的儿童数量以及所使用语言的种类都显著增加，这给及时识别有语言障碍的儿童带来了难题。当前的研究旨在剖析单语和多语儿童在语言处理任务（即非词重复（NWR）和句子重复（SR））中的表现。我们采用了：（1）跨语言（CL）和特定于英语语言（LS）的NWR，以及（2）英语、波兰语和俄语的SR。记录了儿童的社会经济地位、语言出现情况、接触英语的年龄（AoE）以及在家中说英语的比例。该研究纳入了88名5至8岁、就读于贫困地区一所学校的儿童。CL和LS NWR在单语和多语儿童中产生了相似的分数分布。这些任务识别出少数表现显著低于平均水平的儿童，而两组之间没有显著差异。在英语SR中，单语儿童的表现显著优于多语儿童。对英语与波兰语/俄语SR的比较表明，一些儿童在两种语言中表现平衡，而另一些儿童则表现出明显差异，根据他们接触英语的年龄和在家中说英语的比例，在波兰语/俄语或英语中表现更好。这项初步研究表明，CL-NWR是一种有前景的筛查工具，可用于识别有语言障碍的单语和多语儿童，而SR则提供了关于儿童相对于其语言接触情况的语言表现的更详细信息。建议仅在儿童所有语言都有可比任务时使用SR任务。
